As the federal election winds its way toward Oct. 19, it’s going to take quite an effort to match the comic drama of that exquisitely staged Conservative party press event in Toronto Wednesday. A cranky man — who was that guy, Grandpa from the Simpsons? — ruined everything by upstaging Stephen Harper himself with a profanity-laced tirade against journalists whose impudence it was to ask Harper about the ongoing bribery trial of Senator Mike Duffy.

At last, something to liven things up. Even the Duffy trial itself — speaking of Canada’s riveting national corruption scandal — resumed this week in an Ottawa courtroom in such spectacular fashion as to require this CBC headline: “Mike Duffy trial: Nigel Wright, Donald Bayne spar over the meaning of ‘sweet’.” Such drama. Whatever next?

One must try to make the issues at stake seem charged with portent and gravitas, of course, and top marks for effort must go to the Toronto Star for this gasket-blowing contribution, from last weekend: “Why Harper (and friends) are a bigger threat than IS.” The point of the piece was that the head-chopping army of rapists and slavers known as ISIL is peanuts when compared to the global threat posed by Harper and his fellow Conservatives David Cameron of the United Kingdom and Tony Abbott of Australia.

I’d be willing to wager that Grandpa found that, too, a bit unfair.

But pause to calm down just a bit and it’s hard not to notice that Canadian politics just now, no matter what the shouters have to say for themselves, is not taking its trajectory in a very American way, or in any British fashion. For this, we should count ourselves very lucky.

First, a synopsis of the American scene reveals a contest for the Republican Party’s presidential-ticket nomination dominated by a cast of gargoyles so hideous and reactionary you’d think the entire money-poisoned spectacle was a lavish reality-television satire produced and directed by a consortium of Hollywood moguls intent on securing Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016.

Clinton remains out in front of the race for the Democratic Party ticket owing to her successful strategy of trying to go unnoticed. Her closest challenger is apparently the fire-in-the-belly socialist Bernie Sanders, a scrupulously honest and reasonable senator from Vermont who would probably feel at home in Canada among either the Liberal party or the New Democratic Party.

Leading the Republican pack is the famously loutish casino and beauty pageant tycoon Donald Trump, about whose vulgarity little needs to be said because dummkopf coarseness is the very thing for which he is best known — that and of course his cartoonish hairdo. But what is worth noting about Trump’s boorishness is that it is proving to be such a favourability-rating virtue that all the hillbillies among his opponents are finding it necessary to emulate and mimic him, just to draw attention to themselves and give the impression that they’re “serious” contenders.

If this keeps up, any advantage sought by Trump’s challengers will inevitably go to the candidate to whom the utterance of ill-tutored bellicosities and loudmouthed indecencies comes most naturally. This is a state of affairs that presents as grim a terrain for such level-headed candidates as, say, Jeb Bush, Trump’s closest competitor, as it does for such distant runners as Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard.

The otherwise presentable credentials that should be useful to Jeb Bush are offset of course by the taint of his family name, his brother being former president George W. Bush (now as much a figure of contempt on the Republican right as among most Democrats) but his most crippling handicap is that he isn’t downright loopy. In Farina’s case, she appears doomed, not in spite of her potential to broadly mobilize both sensible Republicans and reasonable Democratic Party voters, but because of it.

It’s come down to this. Trump floats the notion of a constitutional amendment to allow him to catapult Americans born of illegal immigrants back over that “wall” he keeps talking about building on the U.S.-Mexican border, or takes time to expostulate on the allegedly diminished attractiveness of celebrity supermodel Heidi Klum. This allows former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to score upticks in the polls by proposing to mobilize the National Guard for such national-security purposes as ensuring that even a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim would be prevented from gaining access to an abortion.

Say what you like about some of the crappy choices Harper might have made in his distribution of cabinet posts. If your intelligence is not insulted by the suggestion that Harper’s Conservatives are cut from the same sort of cloth as this, it might just mean you don’t have much in the way of intelligence to insult. Or if you prefer, say what you like about the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair — and there are quite a few things Conservative partisans are saying about Mulcair these days that they should be embarrassed about — but give Mulcair this. He’s no Jeremy Corbyn.

If American right-wingers are suffering through some sort of psychotic episode at the moment, it could be that dementia is the correct diagnosis for what ails a plurality of the 600,000 members of Britain’s venerable Labour Party. Within a fortnight, a scruffy relic from out of the Labour Party’s sojourn in the British political wilderness, back in the final decades of the 20th century, might well be Britain’s new Labour leader.

Like the American mania for Donald Trump, the enthusiasm for Corbyn arises from a weird nostalgia for the old days. But what distinguishes Corbyn from his fellow Labour leadership contenders aren’t so much his arguably antique but nonetheless presentably socialist proposals to rein in amok-running capitalists, his plans to re-nationalize the railways and strengthen the National Health Service, or even the one about reopening some of the coal mines that were shuttered during the Thatcher era.

What makes Corbyn as unseemly a character as Trump is his creepy pronouncements and unseemly associations. Only a few weeks ago, Corbyn was admonishing his supporters to “celebrate the achievements of Venezuela,” a country that Bolivarian socialism has reduced to a corrupt police state enforcing the incompetent diktats of history’s biggest and emptiest food bank. Corbyn was known for banging on about the”achievements” of Moammar Gadhafi’s nightmare state in Libya, too.

Corbyn refers to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends,” blames American “encirclement” of Russia for the Kremlin-orchestrated annexation of Crimea and Vladimir Putin’s unpardonable military adventurism in Ukraine, has no compunction about sharing platforms with drooling anti-semites and cultivates hysterics about Zionism that are still commonplace around the edges of the NDP’s activist base, but which Mulcair, to his credit, has tried hard to keep at bay.

All this leaves the Liberals’ boyish champion Justin Trudeau in the odd position of having to convince voters that the space conventionally occupied by the Liberal Party — a damaged brand he is at the same time trying to remake in his own image and likeness — is most suitable to the disposition of most Canadians. It is a rambunctiously negotiated affair between social democracy and neoliberalism that Harper, who is barely to Trudeau’s right, and Mulcair, who is only slightly and arguably to Trudeau’s left, want to convince voters is best occupied by them.

All of this makes for the dullest, most boring sort of country, comparatively and politically speaking. And we would be wise not to want it any other way.

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